268 - All-Stars of 7th Grade

On this week’s episode, Karen and Georgia cover The Poet of Wichita and the true story of the ‘Cocaine Bear.’

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder a podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's a true crime podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
That's right, And I'm Georgia hard Stark and I'm Karen Kilgerra.
How do you do very well? And you fine? Thank
you good? Do you ever get mad at radian? Do
you ever get mad at people when they say to you,
how are you? And I said good? Thanks? And then
I say how are you and they say I'm well
because they're like pointing out that you just said good,
and so you immediately feel is that grammar passive aggression is? Oh,

(00:47):
I know, I do that well, I swear drives me crazy.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm well.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
I would assume that someone who is posing as a
as some sort of therapist, is what that sounds like
to me? Or so that sounds like someone who's like,
I'm well, I was just at the farmer's market buying
fresh broccoli to steam.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
And do you eat the orget? Do you want organic yet?
Do you eat organic?

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Do you well? No? Because I'm unwell.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Well, I'm fine without with not having organic, So.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, how about I'm just fine fairly getting by.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Do you see these circles under my eye? Do they
look like a well, person's under baggage. I'm well, thank you,
I'm well, I'm well, I'm my step forward wife. I'm well,
I'm well, we're well.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
That just makes me think of banana boys. Scotti Landis Worch.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
He and I were talking about some people that were
like very successful and also had kids, and both of
the husband and wife are famous in some way and
both rich or something like that, and I go, wow,
they really have it all, and Scotti goes, ewh, who.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Wants it all?

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Oh, it's this thing where it's like That's what I
always feel like, especially in Los Angeles, is like I
always want to tell those people with the tall new
buck boots and the white sweater and the big weird
hat and the bleach blonde hair, I know them. I don't.
I'm not competing with you. I'm not interested in your life.

(02:27):
I don't want what you have. I understand that you
believe yourself to be the pinnacle of you know, your
yoga class and congrats and on anato toast. Yes, you're
doing all the things. You're checking all the boxes from
the weird subscription box company that you signed up for.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
God fucking bless get away from me.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Have you seen the movie Ingrid goes West with it is.
There is a character in that, and it's what she
is striving for. What's her name. She's so great even
she pays April Aubrey Plaza and she's trying to reach
that character's lifestyle goals hashtag lifestyle goals. But she's just
like us, so she can't and just screws it all

(03:12):
up in all these like charming not charming ways, like
dark ways, but that like the character they had play
and all of it is so exactly. But loves in
a bungalow in Venice Beach with her hot bearded husband
and their puppy and they have a lot of boho,
you know, Joshua Tree style life and everything they eat

(03:33):
is perfect and cute and it's and so she steals
her dog to become friends with her. It's like, it's
very that. So I highly recommend.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
That sounds really good and relatable. I really love that movie. Yeah,
it's a this Town is, And I think maybe it's
not even this Town. I think a lot of pop
culture has become so drastically homogenized in a way that
is like, and I know this is because I'm never
on Instagram and so when I see little bits of

(04:02):
Instagram pop through it is, it's shocking to me how
strange it. Everyone is starting to look exactly the same
and a little bit like sex stalls, where it's like
sell everyone has equal size top and bottom lips and
they're both giant and they're the exact same size. Everyone

(04:25):
has not a line, a wrinkle or a mark on
their face. Every single person has like half inch long
eyelashes and gigantic eyebrows. I'm not not even like a wrinkle,
not even an expression. And everyone's kind of to the
sideh and has a lot of contour.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
And there's a window and every on every wall in
every room letting in the most dappled lovely sunshine.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
God bless it all.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
That's at all. It's a yeah, it's a fucking rat
race to get somewhere that we don't even know what
the point of it is.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Because it's not real ultimately.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
I mean, I know, Look, I'm not saying beauty is bad. Obviously,
everybody wants to feel good and look good, and that's good.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, good broccoli, you make yourself good for you good
good good.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
But it's don't assume it's interesting just because it's what
you think people want.

Speaker 4 (05:19):
Here.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Let me brag real quick about how real I am
it really ship cat food in this room I'm in
right now. That's how real. And you can't you can't
put that. There's no Instagram filter for that baby. That's
all just like it's all for me, you know what
I mean?

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Like, is it hearty seafood platter or is it more
of a chicken dinner supreme Fisherman's wharf on a hot
day trash?

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, yes it is. That's what it is. Hashtag what
hashtag Fisherman's wharf. You see a seagull picking out an
empty bread bowl that's got like the clam chowder residue
on it.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
And then a tourist right behind it taking a picture
of it, then making the seagulls waist smaller and the
seagulls boobs bigger, and then there's no lines around the seagulls.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Where did he get those boots? Oh my god, did
he have a rib removed? That seagull is so skinny. No,
he's on a paleo diet.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
I was going to say, you lived in San Francisco
in the nineties. No crashing If I'm wrong, two thousands, oh,
two thousands.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, shit, then there's no way you remember this?

Speaker 1 (06:29):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Because there was a thing on Fisherman's Wharf Peer thirty.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
I used to go with my dad, so maybe I
remember it to Peer thirty nine, to Fisherman's Dwarf.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Okay, same same.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Death, yeah, same area, yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
But but basically Peer thirty nine was like the weird
marionette dull store that my parents would be like, we're
never buying you anything from that store, so don't look.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Out precious art pieces. There's no fucking way.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
For They're like, you can pick one thing, and I'm like,
I absolutely want the four hundred dollars marionette. My mother's like,
what is wrong? How do you do it every time?
But they used to have on Peer thirty nine. I
guess I'm thinking this because of the seagule.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
We're yeah, sure, a bag of bones, seagull.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
It's just thinking they had a thing there in the
eighties and you could go in and sing along to
your favorite like Whitney Houston hit and make a cassette
tape of yourself singing a hit. So it was like
individualized karaoke, one person karaoke to no one, But then
you had a tape you could like, was it a
video car?

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Okay, okay, because it's not that long ago that sell
that would have cost five thousand dollars at the time. Yes, exactly,
that is awesome. But I feel like they had those
around in malls all over the country. And then eventually
it became like cause because these videos pop up of
kids doing that, like that must have become the video

(07:53):
you could get. And then like remember how they would
have like teen magazine and you and your sister had
to sit in and they take a of it and
show you on the cover of teen magazine.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yes, it was like the young girl's version of the
time person of the Year things. Yes, it's instead it's.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Like I made it on the cover some you know,
like you getting that and those things are the rich
girl equivalent, not to say you're rich, no offense, the
rich girl equivalent of having to get a caricature drawn
of you on Fisherman's Wharf, which was just like the
bottom of the barrel. Are you ready for your low
self esteem beginning? Yes, there's how big your teeth are, Georgia.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Yes, here's here's how like your head is like from mine.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
You know, they give you a tiny body, yes, like
if you're like I like to ride horses, it's a
tiny body of tiny body on a tiny horn.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, but then you're accentuated whatever you hate about yourself. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
So I already had a big face. So it's like
they couldn't figure out what to do with me because
it was like there was the caricature itself is a
gigantic head.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
That's the joke. I don't know what to do with
this girl.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
It looks exactly this.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
We're make her eyes bluer, like that's not going to
hurt her feelings? How do we how do we make
this child hate herself for the rest of her life?
That just makes you feel better about yourself because you're like, wow,
my eyes are like pools.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
And they're just like so you're saying, that's my real
sized face. Yep, yep, that's that's not a caricature.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
That was for a long time, like what you wanted
is that big head, lollipop head, scanny body, you know,
and it.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Was you're abovellibubed, scanny body, tiny horse, golden gate bridge
in the.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Back, little cowboy hat, like what hashtag this.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Is that was the original Instagram for characters thirty nine.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Can everyone please post their caricature drawing or their cover
of teen magazine photos from when they were kids? I
have Oh sure I was a cowgirl. I have one
as meat as a fucking cowgirl. I swear it's from.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Do Yes, I have one.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
The group of friends I all decided one day we
were going to go to peer thirty nine and you
know who's in it, legendary Holly Gardner tampon suitcase story.
Who's who have to say suffered greatly in the retelling
of the tampon Suitcase story was my best friend from
sixth grade through high school.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
So like, yeah, you really told it and said her
full name if you had really hated her.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Yes, exactly, No, no, no, that was just a bad
moment in our relationship. But but she's in that, you know,
the all stars of like seventh grade essentially, And what
it is is one of those old fashioned cowboy pictures
that's supposed to be like a tin type, right when
we're all dressed up in costumes.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Right, Okay, so here's we're going to do. Steven. There's
no way you don't have a caricature of yourself from
as your kid as a Are you at Jurassic Park?

Speaker 4 (10:49):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (10:50):
I do. So here's what we're going to do that
three of us are going to post it on our.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Sorry, can I just retell hold on Stevens As George
is saying, we know you have one. Steve is looking
It's almost like he was in like a pantomime of
a confused guy. And the second I said Jurassic part,
he snapped right into it.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
But just like, oh yeah, I have as well, because
my sister and I have one of us doing it,
and then we recreated it as adults like a few
years ago.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
Nice. Yeah, is it a character or is it because.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
Like you know, a green screen being like chased by
a dinosaur?

Speaker 2 (11:25):
So we.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Children and adults, Yeah, got it? Like we have the
middle beginning and hopefully end of what they put what
we were able to do as children.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yes, complete, Yes, we we spanned three generations.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
This is our family.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
I think I was too scared to get a real caricature, though.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
You were when you were too scared to find out
what your one major feature is?

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Face?

Speaker 4 (11:49):
Yeah, I think I was too scared. So like a
not sparely farm Georgia. I never. I never did that.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah he was. He was easy on me because I
think I was like four. And then please tag let's
do MFM caricature hashtag because we have the whole thing
point of this is to get our own hashtag. Right,
That's what you wanted, Karen.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Now you're speaking a language like on Twitter, hashtags are
straight up for nerds that never use Twitter. So this Instagram,
I know, Instagram is a completely different language.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
So you have to call this just us, just tag us.

Speaker 3 (12:23):
MFM caricature is good, Okay, I mean those are the
ones we want.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
Big head little but I want big head little body.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Okay, you're looking for a potentially fake magazine cover.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
No I don't. Just so funny. I'd love to see that.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
Whatever the like the play area are. We spent too
much time on this. Just post it and tag us disagree.
I think we could dig deeper on this. Okay.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Also, it makes me think of this too, because it's
like just to not to argue with you.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
First it.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
We were definitely middle middle class, but my mother.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Would always do this thing. We're like, if we walk
by the caricature person, she go.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
You don't want that it's not worth it.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
Pick something that's pick something Rick.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
She would always like out inside of her mouth basically
be like, you know, you know, trash class.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
You're gonna like it. You like it now, you won't
like it by the time.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
She is a smart lady and she knows really how
to work with people. I feel like to like make
them think that they're making their own decision.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, you mean manipulate children.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yes, by daranting one oh one, give them two options,
make one of them shitty, make the other one the
one you want them to do, yes, and then you
get whatever you want. Do you want to nesp or
do you want to help mommy with laundry?

Speaker 2 (13:34):
That's also headwriting.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
If anybody wants to take my class, that's that's.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
Wow, that's good stuff. How did we get on?

Speaker 2 (13:44):
What did we were talking about? How things are superficial
and social?

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Oh yeah, speaking of social media. I have a correction
because social media told us perfect. It's a you know,
another clarification, because last week I talked about the book
I'm reading the Icelandic we guessed Norwegian. It's called I
Remember You by Irsa Syrgador Dot Remember Yes, And we
guessed all sorts of places where this book must be from.

(14:13):
None of them were right, because Deborah Taylor sixteen fifty
four on Instagram said, Yrsa is from Iceland. You can
tell if someone is Scandinavian slash slash Nordic if their
last name has something at the end that resembles son
or daughter, like tut Oh, my God, good to know
Scandinavia is. Then she goes on to give us a report.

(14:35):
Scandinavia is geographically considered Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Culturally, Finland
and Iceland are included generally all five and their territories
like Greenland and the Faroe Islands are considered Nordic countries.
Maybe you can hit Rekovic on your next tour and
invite her to the show. Love you Both.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
So your author lives in Rekuvik.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yes, an Ice.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Recuvic, by the way, is the capital of Iceland.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well I should have known that. Then now we will.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Here's here's why I know. In sixth grade we had
to do reports on countries of the world. I'll tell
this story again, even though it's not really a story.
I love it and I got picked second to last
and the only So if your name got picked a
of a jar, and you got to go up.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
And there goes Matt Brocco. He picks Italy.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Italy's god.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Everyone wants all the people with the Italian grandparents. Oh,
in two mor swipes, Ireland's gone. What come on?

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Then it goes all the way down through the forty
or sixty kids in my class, I can't remember, however many.
Then it's me I pick Iceland.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Last.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Guess who was last? Holly Gardner? No, and she got Malta. Really,
this was pre internet, pre everything is. You're like Wlipedia,
there's two lines about Malta.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
I fucking literally the librarian couldn't help us.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
She was like, nobody knows these countries, nobody wants to
hear about them.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Teacher, what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (16:01):
What's mister Gilardi doing over there?

Speaker 3 (16:04):
So I end up digging up as much as I
can find out and become quite interested in Iceland because
I was like, wait a second, Greenland's the one that
right covered in ice and Iceland Actually to Iceland. I
did a full report. I became a true fan of Iceland.
And then twenty five years later, Iceland is all the
rage and I'm just like, I will tell you about

(16:25):
Rekkuvic and not vice versa.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Okay, well, so I remember You is a good Icelandic book.
It's part of it takes place in Rekuvic. It's fucking creepy,
ast shit. I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
I'm going to look up because that sounds familiar.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
I feel like there might be there's a movie, yes, because.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
It's very like as I'm reading and I'm like, I
can picture the movie. Yeah, in my head, doctor, there's
a little.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Boy, ghost boy, Gustuffson, gud Stuff's doctor, yours doctor, your doctor.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
There one day for tour. Hell, Yes, what do you have?
What are you doing?

Speaker 2 (17:00):
I have a following? Oh shit, dude, and I repeat
and I.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Declare I have started the podcast, which, now this is
weird and maybe you can explain this to me.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
Georgia And okay. The podcast is called West Cork. Oh right.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
It's a true crime legendary true crime podcast that I've
heard about for so long, only recently became available on iTunes.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
Podcast because it was audible original that I recommended three
years ago. Easily easily that it is, so I can't
believe you haven't. It's one of those ones that everyone's
like but caring don't really like it, and you're like,
but no, then no, no no, and then can't tell
yars Later you go, do you know what I found?

(17:45):
I found?

Speaker 2 (17:45):
You know what I well, you know what you need
to hear about?

Speaker 1 (17:48):
I knew lent It's excellent. Uh, it's one of those
angering ones because it's a cold case still I don't
know if anything's come out of it since it came out,
but it takes place in iron Wes, Cork, Ireland. YEP,
beautifully done podcast. It is classic, wonderful true crime pockets.
I didn't know you couldn't listen unless you had audible,
so that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yet it just came, it just became it. We just
went wide.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
And then I was like, god, I know this though,
how do I know this? And I'm listening to it
and obviously what's the one place I would go to
if I'm like, who would have told me?

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Who would have told me about this podcast?

Speaker 3 (18:26):
And truly I was just like for some reason, well,
it's because it was three years ago, which means it
was one hundred years ago in my brain, but.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Also aged and a lot of them like you have
to listen to this, and you're like Okay, I know
and friends tell us. At this point, it's like it's
going to be from one or either us to each
other or a bunch of other people so.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Or literally thousands of other people who know our taste
very well. But I will say this what a listen
even separate from if you're interested not interested in true
crime or just a basic story.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
This almost goes beyond a lot of that.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
There's like a kind of like small town psychology element
to it, and it is a true like just a
quilt of all the different Irish accents. There's a guy
in there. There's an Irish detective who I kept thinking
was from France because his accent would go into.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
This like she's but she's French, She's French.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
This detective is from I believe they said.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
He was from Galway or something.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
I can't remember, but his accent was unlike anything I've
ever Irish style. But it like would go into these
other places and come back around and you're just like,
this is how this brogue turns into all these things,
And this is in all different areas.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
This isn't narrative, this is like real people, because it's
true crime. So yeah, that's good. I'm excited for you.
That's a great one.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
It's I'm just almost done. I'm on the last like
last half of the last episode. But I do that
thing where I can't.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
I can't tell you what if there's been any updates
since it came out, because I haven't.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Oh, okay, I will.

Speaker 3 (20:05):
But I did want to read you one quote which
you may or may not remember. Okay, but there's a
witness who was old who testified to seeing something or
you know whatever, some story, but he was old, so
they were trying to act like he shouldn't have testified.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
And telling me I need to be in a home
for the bewildered. You know. That's his way of saying
that they didn't trust.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
Us o tell me. And he was like mad about it.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Telling me I need to be at a home for
the bewilder.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
My god, do.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
They have those?

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Just if you're generally bewildered, you get to go stay
in the hospital for a while, Like.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
See someone stupid doing a dumb thing and you're like,
I don't even understand why you would try that, and
it's like, let's go home, let's go to your beholder. Yeah,
they will be your.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
Too, bewildered to be out in the world right now,
will be in a home for the bewildered?

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Can we call this episode at Home for the Bewildered Steven?

Speaker 2 (21:04):
So that's my most prominent I just love when.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
There's a good podcast that I get up and like
do the dishes, Yeah, get my stuff done'.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Think you finally have someone supporting you and the things
you want to do and the bullshit shit you want
to do, not the work. It's like, yes, yes, finally
someone wants me to do the dishes and fold my
laundry and like go for a walk.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, just go kind of sit and stare.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Well, if that's what you want for me, West Cork,
you know best because you love me the most, right.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
And I trust you. Can I plug? Can I plug
something about me? Oh?

Speaker 2 (21:40):
I wish you would?

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Okay, great. I was on a podcast and I'm really
I was really nervous about it, and I'm really happy
with the way it turned out and proud of myself
for it because it was like kind of some hard
topics that I hadn't really shared before. So it's this
podcast called turned out a punk that I'm a big
fan of, and it's the Sky Damien who was in

(22:01):
this band Sucked Up, and he interviews people who are
in were in and are in and have been in
the punk scene and how they got into it. And
there's been all kinds of great you know, Fred Armison,
Bill Hater, a lot of comedians and then a lot
of like you know, musicians like the go Gos and
old punks and it's just really cool. And I wanted
to be on it because I love punk, and so

(22:24):
I was on it and I'm I'm really happy with it.
So check out my episode of Turned Out of Punk.
It's episode three twenty one. Turned out Punk, turned out
a punk? Turned out a punk?

Speaker 3 (22:34):
Yeah, awesome, congratulations you. Oh Nora went back to school.
Nora's back, She's back in class.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
What great is she now? Eighth Nebras growing up?

Speaker 2 (22:49):
But also like just in time.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
It just makes me happy because it was really for
someone who loves school so much. And well also I
just can't imagine that in eighth grade, like right when
things are starting to get interesting kind of fun or whatever,
you're getting your footing, Yeah, you just have to go
sit home, sit on the computer for a year.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Gone crazy. I wonder if it's like if it's kind
of got them out of some trouble they would have
been in, or means that now they're going to get
in more trouble to make up for the past trouble
they would have gotten into.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
I say, probably more trouble. Yeah, although did I tell
you when Laura told me she was going back. I
texted Nora and said, I hope you're still popular? Do
you think you're going to be pop What if you're
not popular anymore?

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Did I tell you that?

Speaker 3 (23:35):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (23:36):
You didn't tell me that. That's so funny.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
She sent all the laughing like crying emojis, going, I hope.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
So. Do you think it's like it's like, you know,
how you measure how much you've grown on the wall?
Do you think when they all left school before, right
when COVID hit, they all measured their popularity on the
wall and they have to go back and stand up
against the wall again and be like, oh shit, Nora,
you're still at the same popularity level. But but Lisa two,
l's over here, is popular here that she's dirocketed over

(24:03):
the past year. I give her, you have to give
you your crown.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
It's so confusing at this age but yeah, I guess
people just don't like you in real life. Like you're
great on zoom. It's your worst nightmares. You're only good
on zoom. Can you imagine if you adjusted so well
to the pandemic that then you really as opposed to
all the people that are just hate being on zoom
and the timing so off and shitty, You're just like

(24:29):
I've come alive on Zoom. Yeah, people finally care about me.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Don't make me go back to standing on two legs
and happen to wear pants in front of people and
not being surrounded by the stench of cat food.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
I can't.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
I am at my best when I'm surrounded by the
stench of cat food and no one knows it. That's
when I'm at my best.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
I just need two snoring dogs near me to really podcast.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
What if I started, I know, I love your dogs,
they're out. What if I started wearing like a cardboard
He's a cardboard behind me that has this wallpaper on it,
just so I always have because I need this background now,
this pink click floor A backpack with a basic pink
floral wallpapered cardboard background. Yeah, just so everyone knows how

(25:15):
good I look, yeah, with this, I'm.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Going to start carrying around books like I'm in the
eighth grade and I expect, Oh, these are my books
from my bookshelf, from my zoom.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Remember how I was trying to see smart like a belt,
a old leather belt around the books. You don't know
when they went to school like that?

Speaker 2 (25:33):
What was that all about? Oh? Did you hear the
great author Beverly Cleary Dye?

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Mahee, what a legend she really? She wrote amazing books.
She wrote a ton of great books. Boys like those books.
Girls like those books. Young old everybody read them to.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Your kids, Get them into it.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
God, it's so good. Ramona Quimby.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
There's one that starts out Ramona's so upset because her
and Beesus went to the playground and some kid kept saying.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Jesus, Jesus to Beesus and Ramona was out of her
mind angry.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
And I was like, I just remember reading it and
being like, get let's get into this.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Ramona, what happened to you?

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Tell me your story?

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (26:19):
I mean, like, it's such good writing for kids. It's
saying what happens to you matters? And like is a
story worthy?

Speaker 1 (26:27):
And a yeah, yeah, so good. You don't like waltzing
through a wardrobe to get your story written. Everyone.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
You don't need a big, weird Christian lion telling your story.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
You don't need a giant peach. You don't need insects
to be your friend, although it's very hopeful.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
I also I loved the idea of being on a
giant peach that you could like lay on and then
just take a bite of if you want to.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Oh my god, that was my favorite. I read that
book so many times when I was a kid.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
We read that book.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
Also, did you have the copy of James and the
Giant Peach that had the original illustration? And when they
first show James, he is so scary looking, like his
little eyes are so dark and he's all like, you know,
because his parents were his parents were killed by escaped
animals from the zoo hippopotamus and so we had to
go live with ant Spiker and Ansons shot us books

(27:17):
ever so tragic.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
It's so tragic and horrible. There's so mean to him.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
I know, Jesus, we were no wonder w're the way
we are? I know for real, it's all real Doll's fault.
Should we do exactly right news.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
Yeah, I don't think there's much exactly right news this week, right,
just some highlights of good stuff that's happening on shows that's.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Right, well, really exciting. I'm sure you heard the trailer
that tenfold more Wickeds Season three kicks off this week.
It's called who Murder in the Court and it covers
historical true crime story about a fractured family in Texas.
So check that out. It's so good. It's so such
a good series. It's such a good podcast. We love it.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
We're so proud of Kate Winkler Dawson and all her
amazing writing talent and her amazing podcasting talent. She really
is making just a hit. Yeah, I mean, people really
love this show, such good feedback on it. She's just
she's amazing. We're thrilled to work with her. There's more
COVID nineteen information on this podcast will kill you this week,
So go check out what Erin and Aaron have to

(28:20):
tell you. There's just it's a bonus episode.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
So much good stuff. And I saw what you did.
Millian Danielle watch and discuss the amazing films with the
incredible Pam Greer, including Jackie Brown and coffee. I mean
those are fricking classics. This woman is a legend, and
Millian Danielle are the people to tell you about it.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
They break it down, all right? Should we get into this?

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Oh yeah? Also pop sockets in the merch in the
merch store, myamurder dot com store, pop sockets, we have
lots of them. Goodbye, pop sockets. Get into it, get
into it, pop it, pop it and lock it.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Story I'm doing this week was recommended by a listener
whose Twitter handle is or her Twitter name is sweetly sarcastic.
She's at sweetly sarcast She sent me a tweet that
said it said read this on medium dot com. Immediately
thought of you twists turns, psychological drama. Highly recommend and
a damn good my favorite murder story too XO. And

(29:21):
she put the link and then she put no offense
hashtag true crime.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Which made me laugh. Me there, I think it's being
sweetly sarcastic. Got it.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
So.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
That attached was a link to this article on medium
dot com written by Corymead called The Poet, and it
tells a tale of this story out of Wichita in
the late seventies that I have never heard even an
inkling of So the majority of what I'm about to

(29:56):
tell you is a retelling of Corey Meade's article from
medium dot com okay called the Poet. Uh, so I
highly recommend.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Is Wichita spooky or is it just me?

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, you know what you're think, You're about to find
out why you think?

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Or do you want me to just say it right now?

Speaker 1 (30:12):
No?

Speaker 3 (30:12):
Go okay, no spoilers. Well it's about to happen. Uh,
there's there's other information we got was from medium dot
medium dot com article by a writer named kam Brown
called Trauma Stole These Women's Lives, as well as a
nineteen eighty eight People magazine article by writer named Jene Stone.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Also an article from The wich dot.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Eagle by Jason Tidd and UH Legacy dot com. Information
from Legacy dot com, and also UH facts from a
book called Nightmare in Wichita the Hunt for the BTK Killer.
That's what you're thinking of, of course, yes, so we go.

(30:58):
I take you now to Wichita, Kansas, November twenty first,
nineteen seventy eight. So forty eight year old Ruth Finley,
who's a secretary for the head of the security at
Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. She's out running errands on her
lunch break in downtown witch Talk, and she's leaving a

(31:18):
greeting card shop on North Market Street when a blue
green nineteen sixty four Chevy bel Air pulls up, cuts
off her path, and a man jumps out. He's wearing
black framed glasses and a jean jacket over his sweater. No,
he's not a hipster, it's nineteen seventy eight. He isn't
about to ask her about animal seeing, animal collective life,

(31:39):
or if she has an extra cigarette.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Ruth immediately panics because she's seen this man before. This
is actually the third time this stranger has approached her,
each encounter being a little bit scarier than the last.
So at this moment he jumps out of the car,
Ruth looks around. All she can see is an old
lady like way up.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
The street, so she knows she's.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Alone, so before she can do anything, she's kind of
in shock. He kicks her in the shin really hard,
then yells, have you got my money? She doubles over
in pain, and as she does, the man shoves her
into the back seat of the car, slides in next
to her, and then a man who her attacker calls Buddy,

(32:25):
who's sitting behind the wheel drinking from a paper bag
wrapped bottle. He basically takes off when the attacker shuts
the door, so Ruth immediately slides over and tries to
get out the other backseat door, but it's the handle's gone.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
She looks around.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
She notices the upholstery in this car is torn up,
the floorboards littered with junk. There's chains, there's rags, there's
an old gas can, there's pieces of concrete, and she
also sees the dashboard is held together with masking tape.
The man her attacker, starts going through her purse. He

(33:02):
pulls out a three hundred and fifty dollars paycheck, one
hundred dollars savings bond, and her.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Safety deposit key. He says, we've struck it rich.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
But then he finds the business card of a police
officer and he starts screaming, you damn stupid bitch at her,
and he picks up one of the pieces of concrete
on the floor, hits her in the head with it
and knocks her out, So she's fading in and out
of consciousness, but she later remembers snippets of the men's conversation.
At one point there at the Twin Lakes shopping center,

(33:32):
she hears the driver complain.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
About the shoddy job that Sears.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
Did on fixing his car. At another point, she hears
them say we'll get rid of her, but not here.
It's then that she remembers she's got a can of
mace in her purse because the other two times she
ran into this guy, it scared her so badly that
she has Mason her purse. But she's too afraid to
move or do.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Anything at the moment.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
They end up driving around for hours, and so finally
Ruth says, you have to let me out.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
I have to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
They both laugh at her, and then she basically says,
I'm going to throw up if I don't go to
the restroom, and she starts gagging. So they say, okay,
hold on a second, and they pull into a park.
So at this point, now it's cold and dark out
because it's November, So they make Ruth take off her
sweater and her shoes so that she won't run anywhere.

(34:26):
You try to get away and her abductor you know,
the guy who jumped out at her on the street.
He walks her into the park and he's saying stuff like, oh,
this is going to be fun. I'll watch you and
you watch me, and then he unzips his pants to
start peeing. He says, I'll go first, and she grabs
her can of mace and sprays him with it because

(34:48):
they let her take her purse. Yes, So then she runs.
She runs up, she sees a bush. She kind of
runs away, hides in the bush. The guy's walking around, going,
you can't get away, you'll freeze out here.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Just come out.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
We'll be nice to you, you know whatever. But she
stays hidden. Her feet start going numb from how cold
it is. She waits, She waits until it all goes quiet,
and then she runs up to a higher vantage point
and when she doesn't see the car the bel air,
she sees that basically they've left, so she goes. She

(35:25):
runs out of the park and she runs across the
street to a liquor store and has the store owner
call the police and then call her husband Ed. Amazing,
So now her husband Ed hasn't heard from her all evening,
so he's already filed a missing person's report.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
With the police.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
So the liquor store store owner calls Ed, says who
he is, says Ruth is safe.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Ed rushes to.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
The store, but by the time he gets there, his
wife's already been taken to the police station, so Ed
when he finally sees Ruth, she's shaken, but she's grateful
to be alive. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time she's
experienced a brutal attack, and it wouldn't be the last.
So Ruth Finley her maiden name is Ruth Smock. She's

(36:13):
born in February first, nineteen thirty in rural Missouri. She's
one of three children. Her father's a farmer, her mother's
a homemaker. She has a normal upbringing by Depression ARA standards,
so they had enough money to live, but they didn't
have any extra Like most families, her parents are pretty
strict and they were very stoic.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
You know, none of the kids are really They were
all encouraged to keep their emotions to themselves.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
So when Ruth is fifteen, she moves out on her
own to a boarding house in nearby Fort Scott, Missouri,
to take sewing and typing classes, and a year later
she gets a job working for the local phone company,
and then on the night of October fourteenth, nineteen forty six,
when Ruth is sixteen years old, she comes home from

(37:04):
the grocery store and is startled by the sound of
the screen door opening behind her, and she turns to
look and sees a roughly fifty year old white male
intruder who grabs her starts pulling at her clothes. She
fights back against him. She presses her thumbs into his eyes,
but the man overpowers her. He has a chloroform on

(37:26):
a rag that he holds over her mouth, and as
she's passing out, she sees him heating a flat iron
over the stove. She wakes up later with scratches on
her face, arms, and legs, and both of her thighs
branded with first and second degree burns.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Oh my god, but her.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
Clothes are intact and investigators find no evidence of sexual assault,
and it's unclear if that assailant was ever caught. So
she goes on to Mary when she's twenty years old
June first, nineteen fifty and she marries her husband, Ed Finley,

(38:04):
who's an accountant for construction firm. They settle into a
one story house in a quiet neighborhood in Wichitak, Kansas.
Ruth gets a job as a secretary for the head
of security at the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, and in
their free time Ed likes to paint landscapes and Ruth
makes ceramics.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
They have two sons, and.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
They basically live a quiet, fairly normal life. She's described
as soft spoken, sober, and they're just an average middle
class couple. So basically all of this starts on a
day in June in nineteen seventy seven. So basically, at
this point, Ed is fifty years old. He's working in

(38:46):
there in the backyard when he suddenly collapses.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
So he's rushed to the hospital.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
Everybody thinks it's a heart attack, but he has to
spend the night in the hospital to get his diagnosis
of what's actually going on. So, with both of their
sons grown and out of the house, Ruth, now forty
eight years old, is left to spend the night alone
in her house for the first time in thirty years.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
And this is after the attack, right.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
No, no, no, we're this is before. So this is
this is how everything started.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Oh okay, got it? Got it?

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Is this night June in nineteen seventy seven. Okay, so
she turns on the radio to distract herself, but all
of the news on the radio is about Wichita's first
serial killer, the BTK killer, and the seven victims he
had so far murdered.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
Oh no, so yeah, he had been he had been,
you know, obviously going undetected.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
There's basically had a serial killer loose in.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
Wichita and no one knew who he was and it
was just it just he had killed seven people at
that point. So that's her first night home alone, so
she has to turn it to a different state to
distract herself. And then a little later that night, the
phone rings, so Ruth is afraid it might be the

(40:06):
hospital saying something bad about ed. When she answers, instead,
she hears the voice of a strange man who says,
is this Ruth's moock from a Fort Scott, Kansas? And
she is surprised to hear her maiden name and to
hear her old hometown. She says yes, and he says
I know all about that night, and he then reads

(40:27):
the article from an October nineteen forty sixth issue of
the Kansas newspaper, the Fort's Got Tribune, all about Ruth's
horrifying attack.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
So the man on the other end he reads the
whole article to her. Then he asks if Ruth still
got her brand. She says, I don't know what you're
talking about, but he says that he was a construction
worker who found this article about Ruth in the wall
of a house he was demolishing. He says he's going

(40:57):
a blackmailer and threatened to revive the orient till everyone
she knows unless she pays him.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
She hangs up the phone. She gets a terrible headache,
She goes to sleep, and then she sleeps for ten hours.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
What the fuck?

Speaker 3 (41:11):
So she wakes up the next morning she gets the
call from the hospital to say Ed didn't have a
heart attack. The collapse was from a car accident and
injury that had happened a year before. He has to
stay in the hospital another week for observation, which means
that Ruth is alone in the house for another week,

(41:32):
and she's fearing another ominous phone call from this man,
but none come. When Ed's released and back at home,
Ruth decides not to bother him with the story of
that call and just decides to put.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
The whole thing behind her.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
But then later that summer, she's at work when an
envelope appears on her desk with her name on it.
She opens it up to find that same newspaper article that.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
The man had read on the phone to her.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
So she rips it up and throws it in the trash,
and then the call start again. Ruth keeps him a
secret from Ed, so when she answers the phone and
hears the man's voice, she immediately hangs up, and sometimes
Ed'll answer, but he basically the collar just hangs up
on it. So then in nineteen August of nineteen seventy seven,

(42:18):
she's window shopping in downtown Wichita and she notices a
man that's They're on a crowded sidewalk, but suddenly there's
a man walking alongside her, and then he says, you've
done such a good job working this week, you can
take the weekend off. And she's kind of freaked out,
but she stays calm. She looks at him, estimates he's
in his late forties, he's five nine, he's skinny, He's

(42:39):
wearing a plaid sports shirt and jeans, white canvas shoes,
and he has black hair graying at the temples, so
she kind of takes a picture of.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Him with her mind, but she ignores him basically, and
she just keeps walking.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
But he keeps talking to her, and he says, you
work for the phone company, don't you?

Speaker 1 (42:57):
What do you do there?

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Are you an operator?

Speaker 3 (42:59):
Then he tells her that he wanted big, big one
big at gambling and asks do you want to go
to Vegas? Sometimes, so she's just keep she's still ignoring him,
and finally she says, I'm waiting for my husband, and
his tone changes and he says, are you still married?

Speaker 2 (43:15):
I like your face. I'm going to see you again.
You can count on that.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Some people's fantasies are other people's nightmares. So he disappears
and then like into the crowd, and then Ed finally arrives,
and so she tells him everything that's going on or
that's just gone on.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
He says, oh, he's just trying to flirt with you.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
It's fine, ed Ed.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
So a year goes by, she still gets the occasional
phone call, but she just hangs up and she doesn't
see the man in person again until a year later,
in June of nineteen seventy eight, when she's walking by
an alleyway in downtown Wichita when a hand reaches out
and grabs her wrist, and she hears a man yell Ruth,

(43:58):
get back here, you stupid bit and talk to me,
but she manages to get away from him and she
runs into the Macy's across the street. She finally gets
to the fifth floor of the Macy's, she realizes where
she is, and she's that she's basically like blacked out
from fear, so she calls Ed. He comes and meets
her at the Macy's, and she tells him about that

(44:19):
incident and about the man that talked to her the
year before, and finally tells him about all the threatening
phone calls and all the stuff that happened.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
So they thought.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
Ed actually files a police report, but nothing comes of it.
So then four months later, in October of nineteen seventy eight,
Ruth gets another mysterious letter, and this one is sent
to her home and it's written in the same messy
scrawl that the other ones are written in, and this
one reads fuck you, fuck the police, fuck the telephone company.

(44:49):
Ah shit right, which is I mean, that's how we
all feel. So a month later, the telephone company. Remember
the telephone A bell.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
I remember Ma Bell, Ma Bell.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Oh it used to be these rates. Oh these rates. Okay.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
Basically, a month later and Ruth go to the police
and they talked to a lieutenant Bernie Drowatsky, who's a
thirty four year veteran criminal investigator, and he's all his
time is.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Being taken up by this bt K case.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
I'm sure right, So he's listening to this nice couple
and in his mind he's like, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Just don't have time for this. Yeah bullshit basically.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
But now the Ruth's got another letter where the man
is now demanding one hundred dollars and he ends the
letter like this very threatening letter with a poem and
it says, wherever you go on water or land, you
still got.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
To pay, or I tell about your brand. I am
smart and no things to do.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
You talk to people I despise, like lease, lieutenant and
tellus spies like filled with misspellings and weird spellings and
stuff like that. And this is the beginning of this
onslaught of letters. She just keeps getting them, each one
stranger than the next. They're all they all have spelling errors.

(46:17):
Sometimes he uses really big on like uncommon or like uh,
you know, fancy vocabulary words, and then sometimes he makes
upwards like san choosed or psychosthenia.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
He's always he.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Always refers to Ruth's branding scars. So the Lieutenant takes
these letters to the lab for fingerprint testing. They don't
find anything. We're still getting the phone calls at home,
so it doesn't really seem like the calls stop.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Ruth and Ed hope that.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
The stalker's finally letting up. But then later that month
is when Ruth is abducted by the two men in
the bell Air.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
So that brings us up to November of that first
thing that happened.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
So okay, So now that Ruth has been abducted, suddenly,
Lieutenant Drowatski it's taking this case seriously because it's starting
to match up with the b tkm O, the weird
letters and then the actual physical violence.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Like they're very worried that this is some that it
could be.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
It could be BTK in some other weird form, right,
they don't know, or a copycat, or they don't know
what it is. So the day after her abduction, Drowatsky's colleague,
Detective Richard Zortman goes back to the park where Ruth
escaped and finds her sweater, shoes and footprints leading from
the parking lot to that hiding spot in the bushes,

(47:46):
but he doesn't find anything else. So they also run
a check on all nineteen sixty four Chevy bel Air
owners in the area. None of them turn out to
be suitable suspects for this abduction, so for five week,
several officers are assigned to keep watch over Ruth as
she takes her lunch breaks downtown, but nothing happens in
that time. Another detective named Detective George Anderson takes Ruth

(48:10):
and ed to Fort Scott to dive back in to
her attack from when she was sixteen to see if
he can find any leads connecting that to hurt this
current stoker.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
They end up spending two days re examining the old case,
and she actually reviews a number of mugshots and the
Fort Scott police have on file, but nothing comes of it.

Speaker 3 (48:33):
Detective Anderson even goes back for a second two day
trip on his own to look into it more, but
he doesn't find anything. Meanwhile, Ruth can't sleep, she has
bad headaches, she's getting stomach cramps on a daily basis,
and Ed is spending his nights hidden in the bushes
of their backyard, armed with a twelve gage shotgun, hoping
to catch this stalker approaching the house.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Which I'm sure makes her feel extra safe. That her
husband's like, that's terrifying.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
I know, I know, but they're freaking out, and that
this is their own mini personal family freak out on
top of the wider city Jesus freakout. Then, on December thirteenth,
nineteen seventy eight, Lieutenant Drowatsky receives a letter of his own.
Ruth Stalker is accusing him of quote protecting a whore

(49:21):
from death. The Lieutenant's furious. He now knows Ruth and
Ed from this case. He believes Ruth to be a kind,
good woman, and now he wants to catch the stalker
even now more than ever. So the letters keep coming,
each one with its own dark, threatening, error riddled poem,

(49:43):
and Ed starts referring to the stalker as the poet,
and the name actually ends up sticking. Then, on January
twenty fifth, nineteen seventy nine, the poet calls Ruth at work.
He tells her that he has a quote unquote surprise
for her in the lobby down in a telephone company
built so she's cautiously walks downstairs, and there in the

(50:05):
lobby phone booth, she finds a knife wrapped in a
red bandana.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
She calls the police.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
They start questioning everyone that's been in the lobby and
in the building. A few witnesses come forward and say
that they saw a man resembling Ruth's description of the poet.
They saw him near the phone booth, but no one
really has any information of who he is or where
he went, so no leads are taken from it. A
month later, the poet starts sending letters to local businesses.

(50:32):
He sends a local florist a letter with five dollars
in closed and their requests to send Ruth one black rose.
The note reads quote, if this is not enough e
n uf for a delivered one, then call and then
it has Ed and Ruth's phone number and tell her
to come and get it.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Yikes.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
So, as things get warmer, the letters and the calls
start to slow down, so Ed and Ruth decide to
take advance and plantification to Colorado in July of nineteen
seventy nine. So to get ready for that, Ruth tells
Edge she's going to go to the mall by herself
to get a pair of jeans. And now it doesn't
like that she's going alone, but she says, it's just

(51:13):
going to be fine. I'm just running in really quickly.
So on August thirteenth, Ruth leaves work. She goes to
Dillard's department store at the Town East Mall in downtown
Wichita gets some jeans. By the time she's done, she
goes outside to find herself walking through a practically empty
parking lot alone at dusk.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Now has anything good ever happened in a mall parking lot, Not.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
At all, especially toward the end of the day. And
it's not worse and worse just as the sun goes down.
But this was, you know, is seventy nine, so malls.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
Were new for people. True.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
So before she gets to her car, she hears a
familiar voice yell, hey, Ruth, I didn't think you're going
to make it this easy. She spins around sees the
poet lunching toward her. She tries unlocking her car door,
but she can't get it in time. He grabs her
he shoves her against the car. He tells her to
get in as he tosses a bag filled with rope,
white tape, a red bandana, and half a drunken bottle

(52:14):
of wine into the backseat. He tells her he's going
to take her to a remote bridge near August Airport Road,
but right when that happens, she breaks away from his grasp.
She manages to get into the car through the passenger
side door and close up behind her. The window is
slightly cracked. The poet tries to reach in after her,

(52:34):
but she rolls it up. She forces him to pull
his hand away and pinches a brown glove into the
window as she peels out of the parking lot.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
Grow this, she's a woman, I know, a freaking hero.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
She gets away again.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
At the next red light, she looks down and realizes
that she feels a little lightheaded. She looks down. She's
been stabbed. An eight inch boning knife is dicking.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Out of her left side of the outside of her
tour So holy shit, right, so, she'll later learn at
the hospital this is actually the third stab woom that
she got. There's two more in her back that she
didn't even feel. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
So she drives herself to a gas station phone booth
and there she dials the number that she's memorized two
six eight four one eight one, which is Lieutenant Drowatsky's boss,
Captain al Fimmich. This is his direct line, and before
Ruth can finish introducing herself.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
He picks up. She's like, hi, my name is but whatever,
and he's like, I know who you are. What's going on?

Speaker 3 (53:41):
And then she explains it to him, so he sends
an officer to where she is. But she's so worried
that the poet's going to find her there that she
drives home, which is only five minutes away. Captain Thimmich
is already called Ed and basically said what's going on,
So by the time she gets home, Ed's waiting for
her on the porch.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
As soon as she gets there, he gets in drives
her to the hospital. The police meet the couple at
the hospital, so all of her wounds are treated. The
doctors say that the third.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
Stab wound in her left side, was so deep. Had
gone in any further, she would have died. She stays
in the hospital for nine days. Her story makes the
news once again, and the reporter covering the story for
the Wichita Eagle Beacon newspaper is named Fred Mann. He
reports the incident and then in a follow up article

(54:31):
he includes the police sketch of the poet, and for
that he begins to get threatening letters from the poet.
So the day after Ruth gets out of the hospital,
one of the nurses tells the police that a man
who resembles the police sketch of the poet visited the
nurses station several times while Ruth was in their care,
so as a precaution, Lieutenant Drooski stays at Ruth and

(54:55):
Ed's house for two days just to make sure they're okay.
Nothing happens while he's there, so by September of nineteen
seventy nine, the police have no leads and Ed is
growing desperate to protect his wife. His employer puts up
a three thousand dollars reward on the Finley's behalf for
information leading to the poet's capture, but Ed also tries

(55:16):
contacting the poet himself. He actually puts an ad out
in the Wichta Eagle Beacon that says, poet, tell me
what I owe you our sf and the poet responds
to oursf the price of my service to stay alive can.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Now be settled at five.

Speaker 3 (55:33):
But this isn't enough information for ED to know how
much that is or what it's supposed to mean. They
go back and forth several times, but none of it
leads anywhere, and it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
It doesn't. Nothing happens.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
So in October of nineteen seventy nine, the newspaper puts
out a statement saying that they've been receiving letters from
the poet directly to them. In one, he writes, quote,
make sure that you don't confuse the executioners, again referencing
the rumors that the poet and BTK are the same person.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
So the public, of course, is following.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
This story like word for word, and there's rumors all
around town. Calls to the police constantly roll in with
alleged poet sightings. None of them bring any leads or evidence.
So Lieutenant Drowatsky assigns eight officers to go undercover around downtown,

(56:29):
and they have Ruth ware a wire whenever she goes out,
just in case he approaches her. Downtown again, there's no
sign of him, but more letters with poems in them
turn up on the Finley's porch and in their mailbox,
and at night they can hear strange noises from their garage,
but when they go out there, they don't catch anybody.

(56:50):
On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy nine, the Finley's phone lines
are cut, and that's the second time that's happened, so
they're running out of options.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Ruth agree to undergo hypnosis.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
To see if she can recall any other details from
her attacks. A psychologist named doctor Donald Shragg works with
Ruth for two sessions until they reach the matter of
her kidnapping, and her demeanor shifts from calm to distraught
as she cries out, I want out of the car.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
I want out of the car. Doctor Shragg. After this
these sessions, he concludes that whoever the poet is quote,
it's likely he's had psychological treatment and possibly has been
an estate institution end quote. But he also believes that
the man's highly intelligent. So in January of nineteen eighty,
Lieutenant Droatsky is promoted to vice and organized crime, so

(57:41):
a man named Captain Mike Hill takes over Ruth's case.
Soon after, Captain Hill receives a letter of his own
from the poet. A line of witch reads there was
once a captain who had an asshole for a heart
because a poet. Wow, I mean, it's really, it's so visual.

(58:02):
So Dorotsky had forged this strong friendship with the Finleys.
In fact, they went to the same church.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
They had basically the same political views, and so Doatsky
and his wife went out with Ed and Ruth on
like double dates sometimes like they socialize together. But Captain
Hill has no personal relationship with them at all, so
it gives him the advantage of an objective point of view.
His first move after taking over the case is to

(58:30):
install a surveillance camera in the Finley's backyard. He has
officers posted in the Finley's dining room on a round
the clock watch, checking the cameras monitors for any suspicious activity.
Ruth feels guilty that all of these officers have to
endure such a boring job, so she's constantly making them
bake goods, and sometimes she even reads some of the

(58:51):
poet's letters aloud to them for entertainment. Really, so a
month letter later, on Valentine's Day, Ruth gets a menacing
val Time themed message and a second letter containing a
strip of red bandana, and they are also letters being
sent to local businesses. The utility companies get letters instructing
them to shut off Finley's gas and power. The health

(59:14):
department gets a letter claiming that Ruth Finley is spreading
STDs around town. The local mortuary gets a letter threatening
that Ruth quote would be requiring.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Them soon end quote.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Yikes.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
So now Ed is driving Ruth to and from work,
so she's never by herself. And at this point it's
been three years, so the police have looked into more
than three hundred people of interests, all of them are
dead ends. They install another security camera at the Finley's home,
this time hidden in a birdhouse in the backyard. Nothing happens,
so in the spring of nineteen eighty, they decide to

(59:48):
use Ruth as bait. They have for wear a bulletproof
vest and walk around in downtown Wichita while several undercover
cops are patrolling the.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
Area, but nothing comes of it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
Then, on June third, nineteen eighty, Ruth gets a letter
from the poet that's postmarked from Oklahoma City, so the
Wichita Police contact Oklahoma City Police. They discover that an
anonymous woman called in to report a recent poet citing.
So the police close in on a man who's recently
been fired from his job in Wichita, and they're certain
that this must be the poet, But when they bring

(01:00:23):
him in for a lineup, Ruth says that although he
does look similar, it's just not him. So by July fourth,
nineteen eighty, this story's national news. The rumors that the
poet is BTK continue to spread, and police actually have
a psycho linguistic expert named doctor Murray s Myron examined
the handwriting in the letters I think I know, so

(01:00:46):
he determines that while it's the handwriting is actually similar
to Btk's, it's highly unlikely that they're the same person.
But the public can't let go of that idea. Okay,
So the next few months, ranger and stranger items start
showing up on the Findley's front porch, an ice pick,
broken glass, molotov cocktails, firecrackers, cigarettes, even hair, And at

(01:01:11):
Christmas time, the Finleys are watching TV when they're jolted
by the sound of their window breaking. Ed runs out
onto the porch to find a burning wreath has been
hung from their front window and the heat from that
caused the window to explode. In a rage, Ed runs
out into the street with a pair of garden shears,
screaming that he's going to kill the poet so they can.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Things continue like this into nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
The Witchdop police are widely criticized by the public, who
can't believe they haven't been able to catch the poet,
and they also simultaneously aren't catching BTK either. So now
Chief of Police Richard Lamunion or La Monnon But I'm
going to say La monion is. He's left fending off

(01:01:57):
questions from the press about his departments in f to dude.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
But La Mignon's.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
Annoyance turns personal on Friday September fourth, nineteen eighty one,
when the poet sends.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
A letter to his wife. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Now fed up, La Mognon, who has had no personal
involvement in the case as of yet, takes it over himself.
So he on September fifth, he takes all the poet
case files home and pours over them. It takes him
several days, but at the end of his research he

(01:02:31):
believes he knows who the poet is. He calls a
private meeting for select officers on September eleventh, nineteen eighty one,
and he begins to explain his very secret theory. He says,
he finds it strange that all of Ruth's attacks have
been in public places, yet there are zero witnesses to
any of these attacks.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
It's also strange that despite.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
The all all the hours of round the clock surveillance,
no officers and no neighbors have ever seen a trace
of a trespasser, not even footprints on the Finley's property,
and they live on a dead end street. When the
surveillance camera is installed in the Finley's backyard, all the
action moves to the front porch, and then after Ruth's abduction,

(01:03:17):
the only footprints the investigating officer find at the park
are Ruth's. And when Ruth is stabbed, instead of calling
nine one one at the phone booth like a regular
person would, she calls the direct line for Central Investigations.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
The officers in the room.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Basically, what he's saying, yeah, is he thinks that the
poet is Ruth Finley.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
As soon as you said, uh, he's able to look
at it with the new chief, is able to look
at it without any personal you know, because he's not
friends with her. I was like, no, he doesn't have
biased he knows it's her, Yes, And then they hit
me and I was like, don't say anything, shut up,
shut up. Oh god.

Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
This is exactly the way writer Corey Meade laid this
this article out. So the entire time, you think you're
just reading this a case that you've never heard of before,
and then by the time it gets to that exactly thing, yeah,
where you're just like, this woman is being hideously victimized.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Why have I never heard this story before? So, but
here's the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
All of these police officers, which PD, think this guy
is nuts. They think the chief is totally lost it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
Well, there's no munch House in the syndrome back then, right, Like,
why would anyone do that to themselves?

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
Right exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
It's it's the kind of thing that, yes, no one
had ever talked about anything like that detailed before. But
also they know Ruth, they've come to know her over
the past four years. They cannot believe she'd be the
kind of person who would put her husband to that,
Who who would do that to the police or do
it to herself.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
That's not what she's like, like, that's she's a.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
Kind quiet you know, very upstanding lady, and what would
her motive be? It didn't make sense to them, it
didn't add up, but since La Mounion is the boss, they.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Have to follow his theory.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
So beginning Monday September fourteenth, nineteen eighty one, La Mounion
sets up a twenty four hour surveillance on the Finleys,
with officers trading off twelve hour shifts in a van
two blocks away from the Finley's house at the Eastgate Mall.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
This time without the Finley's knowing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
So three days later, at eight thirty in the morning
on September seventeenth, the surveilling police capture photos of Ed
driving Ruth up to the mailbox at the Eastgate Mall
and depositing several pieces of mail. So they run over
and basically it takes them until one thirty to get

(01:05:54):
a postal officer sorry the postal inspector to open that mailbox,
and inside they find two letters from the poet, but
too much time has passed between when Ruth dropped the
mail off and when they were finally able to get
it open, so technically someone else could have mailed those letters.
Like they don't know for a fact, those are the

(01:06:15):
letters she put in. So basically, nine days later they
get another opportunity. Once more, Ed drives their car up
to the same mailbox, Ruth leans out the passenger side
to drop the mail in, but this time an undercover
cop pulls up right after them blocks the mailbox, pretending
to have car trouble, so no one else can use

(01:06:36):
this mailbox until they get the postal inspector down there right,
so this time they're mixed in with the Finley's regular
mail is another letter from the poet. Once this is confirmed,
they reseal the envelope and they let the mail carrier
deliver that letter to the Finlay's home.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Sneaky, sneaky.

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
So the next day, which is Sunday, September twenty seventh,
Ed brings the poet letter to the police, as he
does with all of the poet letters they receive. But
then the police launch a search for more of the
Finley's mail everywhere businesses they sent payments to, you know,
like mail at her work, and they basically inspect all

(01:07:20):
the envelopes and they're able to match the edges of
the stamps because stamps used to get pulled out of
books and stems, and you would tear there'd be perforated
little holes where you pull the stamps apart. They match
the tear the tear aways, and they see that all
of these stamps are from the same book.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
They can put them all back in.

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
So police gain permission to search Ruth's office at work,
and there they find the book of a book of poetry,
paper with the poet's handwriting on it, and a red
bandana concealed in a tissue in Ruth's desk. All of
this is another to warrant a search of the Finley's house,
So on September twenty eighth, while the Finlies are away,

(01:08:05):
they search the house, but they actually find no hard
evidence inside the house come on. But then two days later,
on Wednesday, September thirtieth, Chief Lamunion and his wife Sharon
get another letter from the poet and at the bottom
of the page the page is torn off, so through
microscopic fracture analysis they are able to determine that the

(01:08:27):
torn off piece from Ruth's trash can at work matches
the piece at the bottom of the letter that Lamnion received.
Yeah and this, yeah I got it, Yeah got This
solidifies the case So the next day, on October first,
nineteen eighty one, the police ask Ed to come into
the station to pick up the latest batch of poet letters,

(01:08:49):
which is.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
What usually happens.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
But when he gets there, Captain Hill and Detective Jack
Leon take Ed into an interrogation room and they start
asking him quite questions. Now Ed's confused, but he cooperates
that basically the officer spent two hours asking Ed about
his life, his upbringing, all the way up until the
beginning of the harassment in nineteen seventy seven, and they

(01:09:13):
to get the idea of basically, is Ed complicit in his.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
Voice plan, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
Finally, Captain Hill tells Ed that he knows who the
poet is, and Ed says, well, I hope the hell
you do. Let's go get him. But then Hill shows
Ed pictures of his wife dropping letters in the mailbox
at the mall and explains that they can confirm that
Ruth is in fact the letter writer. Ed is in
utter shock. Hill asks if he'll agree to a polygraph

(01:09:42):
test so he can be eliminated as a suspect. Ed agrees,
he passes the test. He was never involved. It was
all Ruth by.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
Herself, Eddie, I got bad news for you, I know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
So at five o'clock that same afternoon, Hill calls Ruth
and has her come down to the station to at
mugshots to see if she can identify the poet, which
is a common practice for her at this point. Yeah,
she agrees. Hill walks her through the same interrogation procedure
that he walked ed through, and he finally asks Ruth
if she wrote any of the poet's letters. She says no,

(01:10:15):
but when he shows her the surveillance photos of herself
mailing the letters and says that he can prove she did,
she finally admits. She says she has a vague memory
of sitting in her basement writing letters, but when she
thinks back, she can't tell what's a dream and what's reality.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Dear, I was hoping you were going to say, they'd
show her a mugshot lineup and hers was in it,
and that's what she'd know. And she's like there he
is right there.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Oh yeah, basically, he asked. He then asked.

Speaker 3 (01:10:48):
He switches his tone and gets mean and asks her
if the attack from when she was sixteen years old,
if that even really happened she swears it did. She
gets starts to get really upset. He switches back to
a gentle tone and basically says, quote, Ruthie, why it's time.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
It's time to tell me why. I'm not mad at you, Ruth.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
I want to know why you're doing this. So, after
some prodding, Ruth eventually admits to everything, the letters, the calls,
the odd objects left at her house, even her own stabbing.
But she says it wasn't a deliberate plan as much
as it was kind of this fuzzy memory that she
can barely recall. Basically, she's really ashamed, and she's almost

(01:11:36):
she's confused, but she's really ashamed. And when when Hill
says to her, there's no hard feelings between you and me,
Ruth says, quote, there should be.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
I wish I was dead.

Speaker 1 (01:11:46):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
So she confirms that Ed was not involved at all,
but she makes it clear she needs medical help. She
says she thinks she's crazy, and then she says, quote
I tried to figure out what was wrong, but I
couldn't stop bit.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
So that night, she's taken to the.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
Psychiatric ward of Saint Joseph's Hospital for treatment. After much debate,
the Witchtop Police make the controversial decision not to press
charges against Ruth, citing that she was suffering from severe
mental distress and had no malicious intent. She did, however,
cost the department almost four hundred thousand dollars for all

(01:12:22):
their investigative efforts over the past four years, and Chief le'
mognon does not agree with this decision not to press charges.
He considers her a dangerous criminal. Basically, Ruth goes into
therapy with a doctor, Andrew Pickens, and this goes on
for the next seven years, and she's finally able to

(01:12:45):
uncover the source of her issues, which takes her a
while to get to and then takes her years to
process afterwards. But an essentially what's interesting and kind of
fascinating about it is she does it using the same
technique that the poet does. She begins writing poetry about it,
and she finally unwinds like all of those things that

(01:13:09):
she was writing in the poet's poems, they all kind
of pulled into her reality and what she basically had
faced a long buried childhood trauma of sexual abuse by
a neighbor when she was only four years old, and
it was a man who had used red bandanas to
tie her up.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
So, oh, my God said, like there was actual symbolism
in her Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:13:40):
So she basically says that when that happened to her
and it went on for a couple months, that she
would remember quote unquote floating off to heaven, which was
a common which is a common associative tactic that the
brain uses in times of severe trauma. So it's a
defense tactic her doctor's theory that allowed her to develop

(01:14:02):
this kind of separate identity as the poet. And then
in nineteen seventy seven, when Ed has his heart attack
and she is alone for the first time in her
life while the BTK is like gone basically killing people
around town and no one knows who he is. Yeah, basically,
her brain switches back into this dissociative mode and the

(01:14:23):
stress she basically it's like this cry for help.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
Wait, so did di did a teenage attack happen?

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
Okay, so that probably that's like, yeah, as far as
we know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
As far as we know, and yeah, and basically it
seems like the police in that town believe I.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Feel like that attack alone as a teenager would have
triggered that reaction from BTK too, because that's a similar thing.
He was breaking into women's houses and murder, itiing up murder.
It's like either of those could have hate all of it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
Yes, it's all.

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
It's all horrible parallels to her life. And if she
was repressing it and then that attack, you know, she
was kind of able to come back. And then she
has this marriage that's really solid for her, and you know,
it's this really strong, great marriage, relationship, family she builds
for thirty years. Everything is like going great, and then

(01:15:24):
this thing happens that's like shock after shock, you know.
So the only person who doesn't believe this theory is
Chief La Magnon, who would later say, quote, I think
she's lying.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
She knew everything she was doing, unquote wow.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
But no one in Ruth's family or friendship circle believes
that at all. In fact, Ed stands by her. Their
marriage lasts through this horrible experience, and she was quoted
as saying, it's been hard on Ed, but he's the
kindest person I know, and he's been very supportive. But
also her friends and neighbors rallied by her side. Her

(01:16:07):
neighbor Emma Dillinger is quoted in that People magazine article, saying,
Ruth told me her story and gave me the option
of cutting off our friendship, but all I wanted to
do was comfort her.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
Oh my God, and.

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
All of Ruth's love love ones like basically had that
same reaction. And after five years in treatment, she feels
strong enough to talk about her story on a local
news station. And after she basically tells her side of
the story, there's they start getting. The station starts getting calls,

(01:16:40):
and ninety eight percent of them were compassionate and loving
and completely supportive of her, Like an overwhelming majority were
just like, this is unbelievable. So it turns out that
the Poet of Wichita was not a violent madman, but
a woman who didn't even know.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
Herself how much she needed to be heard.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03):
On May thirtieth, twenty nineteen, Ruth Finley passed away at
the age of eighty nine. And that is the fascinating
story of Ruth Finley, also known as the Poet of Wichita.

Speaker 1 (01:17:15):
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Give the credit to the person who suggested it to
you again, because brilliant, sweet, sweetly sarcastic.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
Read that article by Corey.

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
Mead first on medium dot Com and sent it along
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
I mean, I.

Speaker 3 (01:17:33):
Also think that part of me hesitated, and I think
I felt like I may have begun to read this
story one time when we were on the road. But
I hate the idea of talking about going this far
into a story where a female victim is lying because
it does. Yes, it doesn't happen that often. Yeah, and

(01:17:55):
that kind of thing of like these false reports. It's
it's I think it's one of the reasons that it's
not a very well known story is because it's this
is it's as crazy as a serial killer.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
It's as unlikely.

Speaker 3 (01:18:10):
It's as you know, it's very common for women to
be stocked, it's very common for women to be raped,
it's very common for women to be attacked and abused.

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
So this is a.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
True anomaly that then kind of grew into a whole
other crazy I mean, whichita it almost it's I don't know,
it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
There's so many layers. There's so many layers to it.
The really good point, but that doesn't mean a story
shouldn't be told. And we tell a huge amount of
different types of stories on this podcast, and this is
one of those examples. But it's not. It's not a rule.
So yeah, I think it's it deserves a place in

(01:18:58):
this podcast. And that was incredible job telling the story.
The medium writer did an incredible job.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
So yeah, it happened. It happened. Here's the thing. It happened.

Speaker 3 (01:19:08):
And it didn't end in a in a pitchforks and
torches mob, you know what I mean. It ended with
people going, why would someone do this? This is baffling, Yeah,
because there weren't. She was the only victim and ed yeah,
and then the wasted time. But it's like, what was

(01:19:30):
she doing? It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up.
And then it's like, but everybody has their reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
And you know, fucking crazy. Great job, thank you, Yeah,
I know it's crazy, all right. I had an epiphany
this week that although it feels like this story is
part of the folklore that is my favorite murder, it's
a tale as old as time in our lives, we

(01:19:58):
actually don't know the full story of the Cocaine Bear.
Oh we don't. We know a snippet from the Minnesota
Minnesode one oh one, Thank you, Stephen, But who, why, what, where?
Let's find out today. I thought you did this story?
I asked Stephen, Did I do it? When we were

(01:20:20):
in Kentucky? Have been We've been to Kentucky.

Speaker 4 (01:20:26):
Yeah, we have it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:27):
I thought, Okay, well great, I's here so too.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
When I was halfway through, and that's why I text
Stephen and he said, no, so not. Don't tell me.
I don't care doing it today.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):
Yeah, if you, if you figure out otherwise, you can
go ahead and let Stephen know at personal Stephen email
at earthlink dot go's.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
Right, all right? So I got info from a Rolling
Stone article by E. J. Dixon, a Slate article by
Matthew Decim, the Kentucky for Kentucky website by Coleman Larkin,
and the IFL Science article by James Felton. So here

(01:21:10):
we go, Karen, I'm gonna tell you the tale.

Speaker 3 (01:21:12):
I want to know the truth about the Cocaine Bear
before I see the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:21:17):
It's truth, it's legend. It's truly a legend. Okay. On
the morning of September eleventh, nineteen eighty five, mister Fred M.
Myers of Knoxville, Tennessee, woke up, walked out of his
home on Island Home Pike in South Knoxville, and found
a dead man in his backyard. Yep. So mister Myers

(01:21:39):
recalled hearing a crash around midnight night the night before,
and it turned out the crash he had heard had
been that of the dead man falling from the sky
and landing in his backyard.

Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
Oh my god, it's horrible.

Speaker 1 (01:21:52):
It is a horrible start. So the body of the man,
who was dressed in khaki and was sprawled out on
his over an unopened parachute. There was no obvious injuries,
aside from a trickle of dried blood from each of
his nostrils, but other than that, he looked fine. Authorities
arrived and found that the dead man was wearing a

(01:22:13):
bulletproof vest and night vision goggles. Uh huh, and was
carrying two different pistols, ammunition, a stiletto knife, freeze, dried food,
and six cougarans, which are gold coins.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
Yes, I love cougarants, that's my favorite. Reference.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
Forty five hundred dollars cash IDs and multiple names, a
membership card to the Miami Jockey Club, and several inspirational epigrams,
which I know you love epigrams.

Speaker 3 (01:22:42):
Epigrams, Yeah, like you mean like keep sore high, like
a mighty bird.

Speaker 4 (01:22:47):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Keep on trucking. Those kids are I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:22:53):
I don't either.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
Let me read you one that's definitely an epigram, because
this was one of the ones he had on him.

Speaker 3 (01:22:57):
Wait a second, is an epigram the same thing forward
and backwards?

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
Because no, mine wouldn't work. No fly high like a
mighty eagle won't work.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
Let me spell that backwards and try to Oh, you're right, okay,
this was one that's one read. There is only one
tactical principle not subject to change. It is to inflict
the maximum amount of wounds, death and destruction on the
enemy and the minimum amount of time. It sounds like
a Chuck Norris type of like thing that they like
that they live by, you know, like a here's what

(01:23:27):
I was like, guy.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
It sounds like the kind of shirt that you'd be
right up against inline at seven to eleven. And then
once you read that epigram or whatever the fuck you're
claiming it to be, then you back way up and
you're just like, uh, oh, I didn't realize you're here
to do the most damage in the short and you're.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
Like, hey, mister, can I touch your nun checks and.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
Hey, are those nun checks in your pockets?

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
Right? So he had that on him poetry, and he
had a dathel bag with about seventy five pounds of
cocaine was ninety five percent pure. And I wanted to
like this. I wanted to like in my head picture
seventy five pounds of cocaine, which is hard to do
with powder, right, So then I looked up, like how
many pounds of chocolate bars would that be? But then

(01:24:13):
I thought, okay, well how much? What kid weighs seventy
five pounds? And so I looked it up. In an
average ten year old female weighs seventy five pounds, So
that's how much cocaine. If you held an average ten
year old female in one hand and cocaine in the
other that weighed the same, you could also do it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
Uh, basically, if you're doing five pound bags of sugar, Oh,
but cocaine, there would be about fourteen.

Speaker 1 (01:24:41):
Bags of sugar. Oh that's a lot. No wonder his
parachute didn't open.

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):
And if it's ninety five percent pure, you can get
some baby laxative and cut it in there and then.

Speaker 2 (01:24:50):
You can have like then you have like thirty five
pounds of cocaine.

Speaker 3 (01:24:55):
You just get all the kids at the junior college
to buy it, and you're in Cabo Baby nineties.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
Karen just snuck up on this podcast and was like, Hey,
I have an.

Speaker 2 (01:25:05):
Idea, heyman, blick nan be cool.

Speaker 1 (01:25:09):
All right, So police can came and we're like, what
is the scene. It was like baffling to everyone. Of course,
narcotics agents came, DEA Customs were very baffled by this
innocent looking backyard scene. I guess it wasn't innocent looking anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:25:26):
Innocent with the Krugarran I'm telling you, anytime Kruegerrands are involved,
this is an international issue that we.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
Have, or it's a spy movie starring Brad Pitt. Either way,
either way, you're fucked. So police by afternoon are able
to identify the body, and even then they still had
few theories as to what the hell happened, but they
do identify him as Andrew Carter Thornton, the Second of Kentucky.

(01:25:55):
So let me tell you about Andrew Carter Thornton the Second.
As you can tell by his name, Yes, he came
from a wealthy family.

Speaker 2 (01:26:03):
He's royalty, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
So He's born on October thirtieth, nineteen forty four, to
Carter in Peggy Thornton in southern Bourbon County, Kentucky. Carter
and Peggy had a grand old time being wealthy and
breeding horses at their stud farm Lucky, so Andrew grew
up living a privileged life in Lexington, Kentucky. He attended

(01:26:26):
prestigious private schools along with other Lexington blue bloods. He
went to the military Academy Swanee Military Academy and then
joined the army as a paratrooper. Then he became an
Air Force officer. He earns a purple heart. You know,
he's on his way up. And next in his illustrious career,

(01:26:48):
he becomes a police officer in the Lexington, Kentucky Police
Force Narcotics Division. So here he is. But then in
nineteen seventy seven he resigns because he now w's toractice law.
So he goes to the University of Kentucky Law school,
and apparently the law applied to everyone but himself because
as a nineteen eighty federal indictment alleges he was part

(01:27:11):
of a drug and weapons smuggling ring called the Company.
Oh yeah, and It also reportedly involved other former Kentucky
police officers as well. So maybe he went to law
school to be like I'm going to keep this business going,
and like not for good reasons. So in nineteen eighty one,
he's arrested along with twenty five other men. They were

(01:27:33):
attempting to steal guns from a naval base in Fresno, California,
risky and for attempting to traffic one thousand pounds of
marijuana into the county into San Diego, Fresno. Oh yeah,
I thought drugs lived in Fresno. Why do they have
to smuggle them in?

Speaker 3 (01:27:52):
Yeah, especially from like Kentucky. Yeah, no one in Kelly
wants to kay wy weed.

Speaker 1 (01:27:58):
No thanks, cave over yourselves and your stud horses. We're
good over here. So DEA agent Robert Brightwell, who says
he worked with Thornton on narcotics investigations in the early seventies,
described him as a quote a double seven paramilitary type personality,
an adventurer driven by adrenaline rushes who became bored with

(01:28:21):
being a cop. So we got this guy who thinks
he's James Bond or Chuck Norris. It seems like a
cross between the two and he's bored with even being
a narcotics cop, which sounds pretty entertaining and fun if
you ask, and stressful and stressful like what more you need?
And legal, so not enough for some people, never enough never. Initially,

(01:28:48):
Andrew was given two felony charges of conspiracy to import
and distribute a controlled substance, to which he pled not guilty,
but he fled the state and then it was found
heavily armed in North Carolina and brought back to California
to face reduced misdemeanor drug charges. So he got his
charges super duper reduced. Let's go back and talk about
how he was wealthy. That's how it probably happened, and

(01:29:11):
ho hoit t toy tea. He pleaded no contest to
the charges, was sentenced to six months in prison and
find five hundred dollars, and he also had his law
license revoked. So, Karen, this last brush with the law
was all it took for Andrew to see the error
of his ways. Straighten up, find Jesus and not cause

(01:29:32):
the death of a black bear. Right, no.

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):
Turns out like no find Jesus. This is how I know.

Speaker 1 (01:29:44):
So a woman named Betty Zarring was his former wife,
and she said about him, quote, he was a he
was a son of a bit an a bitch, and
then she shot two pistols in there.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
This son of a bitch had shitty Kentucky weed, always.

Speaker 1 (01:29:59):
Trying to give me that weird No, she said it
was a philosophical, incredibly disciplined, extremely spiritual, and loyal warrior
with his own code of ethics, who thrived on excitement.
And then she lit a candle on his on her
under his headshot. Okay, yeah, she was into that guy. Yeah,

(01:30:21):
I think she still liked him. So she likes that
think so did your doctor's belch.

Speaker 3 (01:30:28):
No, she growled at me, because I just realized I
didn't feed her dinner, but I did give her two
cheese sticks.

Speaker 1 (01:30:33):
Does shoot you want to go feed her dinner?

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
No? No, no, she could make it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:38):
It's ununlike that song. Booo oh yeah, she went, wow, wow.

Speaker 2 (01:30:45):
Okay, you have to just give me half an hour.

Speaker 1 (01:30:47):
You got it. On September ninth, nineteen eighty five, andrews
now forty, he enlists the help of his don't be
too surprised by this karate instructor turned bodyguard, a man
named Bill Leonard. So the pair, along with a third
man who was a Colombian man that Bill had apparently

(01:31:09):
never met. They get on a Sessina four h four airplane.
So Bill alleges that he just got on the plane.
He didn't know what they were doing, and while en route.
According to Bill, in a nineteen ninety interview with former
Knoxville News Sentinel managing editor Tom Chester, Leonard said that
while he knew of Andrew's shady drug fueled you know,

(01:31:31):
passed and reputation, he had not known that this flight
was to involve drugs. He didn't know, wasn't the officer,
and insisted that Andrew had sprung the plot on him
mid flight as the plane flew over the Bahamas it
was raining and dark, and I guess he hadn't asked, Hey,
who's this Colombian stranger on board with us too? He

(01:31:51):
had an ass style when they were getting a plane.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
He was like, what whatever, Yeah, just let's see a
bunch of strangers on assess night.

Speaker 1 (01:31:58):
It'll be fine. Yeah, sure, thing happen, Yeah, Andrew, No, Uh.
Andrew told Leonard the plan that they would pick up
four hundred kilograms of cocaine in Columbia and smuggle it
into the US.

Speaker 3 (01:32:11):
Although I can see the logic of being like, don't
fucking tell Andrew on the tarmac.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
We have to be in the air. He's gonna have
one of his classic freak outs.

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):
He'll just do it. He always goes along with any plan.
Andrew's the Andrew is, Uh is the what's his name?
Andrew's the main guy. Bill is the uh foil whatever.
It doesn't matter who's got the cougar ins Andrew, Andrew,
Andrew's got the Bill is karate. Bill is the.

Speaker 3 (01:32:44):
This whole thing sounds like Danny McBride and James Franco
got stoned together and wrote this up.

Speaker 2 (01:32:51):
This doesn't seem real.

Speaker 1 (01:32:52):
Does it?

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:32:52):
Not surprise you that Elizabeth Banks is part of it.
Everyone's like, how are you gonna make this music? I
think you just cast it? Essentially there it is, okay,
Bill said, if he had told me, hey, Bill, We're
going to Colombia to smuggle four hundred kilos of cocaine
to America, I would have gone, yeah, right. That would
have been the end of it right there. He tricked me,

(01:33:13):
there is no way in hell. I mean, anybody that
knows me and Lexington knows, there's no way I would
do anything like this. I was a nobody. And then
he winked at the reporter, nudge, nudge, nudge, gave him
a bag of cocaine and.

Speaker 2 (01:33:26):
Walked away, tightened up his brown belt, turned.

Speaker 1 (01:33:29):
And karate chops into the face, and then stole the
bag of cocaine and ran in the opposite direction to
his jojo and fucking all was well. Then, he said
about Andrew when he told him about this plan, He said,
the look on his face was hard to explain. He
was smiling, but he had a very intense look in
his eyes, and he was watching me very closely. In

(01:33:53):
my heart, cocaine in my heart. I would love if
Bill actually was just a spoil who had no clue
about it at all. It was just like this local
Lexington dude that he really liked. He just thought Andrew
was the coolest, and I was like, come along, even
though he knew Bill would suck it up somehow, and
he did. Yep, okay, but Bill hating to be someone

(01:34:13):
who cancels plans. Apparently, they move on with their mission
and picked up the freight that was in Columbia and
were somewhere over Florida, when Bill claimed that they heard
federal agents talking over the radio about following their plane breaker.
Uh so Bill, who had picture this. Bill had been

(01:34:33):
vomiting over an open door out in the plane, because
that's how inexperienced he was on the planes. Poor Bill.
He had like a Hawaiian shirt on because he thought
they were going to the Bahamas. And now was just
flatter with barv No.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
But you still can't tell that's the Tommy Bahama promise.
You can puke on yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:34:52):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):
So he here's this.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
He freaks out, he stops vomiting, and he opened a
door and kicked three bags of cocaine out. Now let's
get rid of this cocaine. Then we're being followed. Andrew,
of course, being a businessman, freaks out and is like
he hates a party foul. So he's like, what the
fuck are you doing? And the two of them start
to argue. Okay, Bill says, quote right at that time,

(01:35:17):
when it looks like we're going to rip each other's
throats out, he just starts laughing. I don't know what happened.
I started laughing. The next thing I know, we're both
rolling around in the plane laughing. That's probably the safety hazard, right,
tears coming out of our eyes. He turned around and said,
I'm really sorry for getting you involved in this. I
can see this is not your thing. You're a family man.

(01:35:39):
Just do what I tell you and I'll get you out.
That's a quote. I didn't just fucking make that up.

Speaker 3 (01:35:45):
This is I'm sorry, but this is also if you've
ever seen the fucking Peter Falk movie and Ellen Mark
and movie The in Laws, this is the very similar
plot to The in Laws.

Speaker 1 (01:35:56):
This is like, we thought the cocaine and bear aspect
of this story was the best part of the story,
so we never bothered looking it up.

Speaker 3 (01:36:03):
I completely, in my mind connected it to a totally
different story.

Speaker 2 (01:36:07):
You did the full version of Yeah, and just in
my mind was like, oh, yeah, that must be connected
to that thing.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
I did not know a story when I ended with
a bear dying on cocaine was going to be even better.

Speaker 3 (01:36:20):
I think it got it was like surmised perfectly in
that email, the original email, where they were just like,
this thing happened, but what's important is this?

Speaker 1 (01:36:28):
Yeah, so you know we're going to boil it down.
I meant to give credit to the first person, the
person who's hometown we read, because they like really brought
it into our lives and deserve full credit. But I
forgot to do that, and I'm sure it's impossible to
find at this point. So it's impossible. It's impossible, all right,
I have it even impossible. That's your name.

Speaker 4 (01:36:51):
It's from Sam. So there's no other details, but it's just.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
Sam, Sam and lexing. I know you're screaming your name
out there and we heard it, so thanks Sam.

Speaker 4 (01:37:01):
Well, because it was about mother's ex boyfriend, the cocaine cowboy,
so I think she dated one of the people.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
Wow, Okay, she dated Andrew Probably Okay, what she dated Bill?

Speaker 2 (01:37:14):
Bill's not the cocaine cowboy. He threw three huge.

Speaker 1 (01:37:17):
Bags cowboy adjacent. Here's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:20):
She is a cowboy entrapman A and B.

Speaker 3 (01:37:24):
If there's a plane following you, don't throw anything out
of their plane.

Speaker 2 (01:37:28):
They can see you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:29):
They're going to go after it. Essentially, is he yes
or no? A cowboy caricature. Andrew's a real thing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:36):
He's got a little tiny gut, tiny horse horse, big head.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
Cougar.

Speaker 4 (01:37:45):
Yes. So Sam's mother dated Andrew Carter Thornton this, holy.

Speaker 1 (01:37:50):
Shit, Sam, shiit? Sam? Is he your dad's secret?

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
Like? If only we knew?

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):
That's it? Okay Sam?

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
How big is your head? How small is your hat?

Speaker 1 (01:38:00):
Sam? All right? Uh? So Andrew tells Bill to cut
list three dethel bags of cocaine from their parachute and
dump them from the plane. Okay, Okay. So then Thornton's like,
I'm gonna help you out, man, I'm gonna get you
out of this. I'm sorry I even got you into it.
You're not really good at this anyways. So he gives, uh,

(01:38:22):
he gives Bill a four a minute lesson in skydiving.
He's like, here's I do this, here's this, put this
outquit that, and he can.

Speaker 2 (01:38:30):
I just really quickly with great rage.

Speaker 1 (01:38:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:38:35):
Say that's not fucking cool as someone as someone who
is taught to snorkel.

Speaker 2 (01:38:42):
Yeah, by being in in a bay in Hawaii with
my stuff on.

Speaker 3 (01:38:48):
And my ex being like, no, no, you have to
like suction it to your face, and just being like
you you don't mention any of this, yeah, at any
time before, Like you don't, You're now waiting until we're
I'm treading in already foot water before you start to tell.

Speaker 2 (01:39:02):
Me the things I need.

Speaker 1 (01:39:03):
Yeah, like you're already scared because you're in the shark tank. Essentially.
I hate it.

Speaker 2 (01:39:09):
Here's the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:39:09):
I really resent people who are bad teachers because they
if they already know it, then in their mind you
know it exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:39:16):
You can't take it like they don't even understand that.
You won't understand the words that are connected to it,
that are like, you know, part of it. I get
what you mean.

Speaker 3 (01:39:25):
Yeah, It's like Bill, who didn't want to be involved
in a drug trafficking situation in the first place, now
has to learn how to fucking skydive under pressure.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
First of all, what is a cougarat And.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
First of all, what is an epigram? Let's start at
the very beginning.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
Is it a poster?

Speaker 2 (01:39:44):
Is it just?

Speaker 1 (01:39:45):
Is it on a half?

Speaker 2 (01:39:46):
Is the trut?

Speaker 1 (01:39:47):
We've got to get an old school like inspirational photo
of a skydiver and get that quote a murdering is
already making it as we're talking. Get that terrible epic
and put it over. But grab a gram whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (01:40:05):
Was it like a hologram but just two sided? Get
a hologram, Get a hologram.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
Let Bill tell the story himself a hologram of Bill.
But the next my favorite Murder live show, we got
Bill on stage. Okay, so, and then Robert Kardashian to close. Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:40:23):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:40:23):
Basically, Andrew ties the remaining defel bag of cocaine to
his body with a nylon bag containing two his whole
kit that he later found dead with spoiler alert. They
so they prepare to jump as the plane on autopilot
now flies over Knoxville. So poor Bill jumps first. He landed,

(01:40:45):
and the word hard is always in there. He lands
hard near Knoxville downtown Island Home Airport, about three miles
from downtown. Thornton had told him to walk to a
grocery store, call a cab and then gave him the
address where he was going to meet Thornton's girlfriend at
the Hyatt Hotel. I wonder if it's Sam's fucking mom. Yeah, perhaps,

(01:41:08):
So they go to the Hyatt Hotel with his girlfriend
to wait for Andrew to show up, but he never
shows up. So let's go back to the morning where
the guy finds the dead body in his backyard that
is identified as Andrew. In Andrew's pocket is a key

(01:41:28):
and they were able to match the key, the tail
number on the key to the wreckage of a plane
which had crashed into a mountain in Clay County, Carolina.
They had found it on autopilot and it had landed
about sixty miles away from where they jumped. That's dangerous,
so dangerous just to let the plane go off by itself,
totally irresponsible, especially they're over Knoxville. That's like human humans

(01:41:52):
live there. So when the cops where the investigators had
found Andrew's body, of course they found all that cocaine
on him and they were like, there's got to be
more cocaine. That was then like in the plane, and
they searched the surrounding areas and found two hundred and
twenty pounds of marijuana of cocaine hanging from a parachute
in a tree in Fannin County, Georgia. They found mapped, clothes,

(01:42:15):
food and all that stuff. A couple of days later,
more deckel bags of cocaine were found months later in
northern Georgia. So cocaine everywhere, it's a fucking everywhere. It's
like a confetti cocaine plane.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
Cocaine needs to egg hunt.

Speaker 1 (01:42:31):
But all through the mountains, so they were found months later.
But before that, a black bear stumbled upon the cocaine
entered our friend, cocaine.

Speaker 2 (01:42:44):
Bear, spotlight cat caine.

Speaker 1 (01:42:48):
Okay, now it's the soul. Well, my baby, lights go down,
spotlight one, cocaine bear. I'm just a little cocaine bear.

Speaker 2 (01:42:59):
Wander. They go around the forest, not high or wired.

Speaker 1 (01:43:05):
What will my debreas?

Speaker 2 (01:43:08):
Oh, what's this? What's this? A pile of powder sugar? No?

Speaker 1 (01:43:17):
Well, a local hunter who sadly has never been identified
because Hero had found the dead bear and told his
friends about it, but none of them reported it to
authorities because they're hunters in Georgia and they don't I think,
mingle with authorities.

Speaker 2 (01:43:32):
They're like, mind your business exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:43:34):
So it took three weeks for the story to finally
trickle down to a game and Fish agent who then
told the agent's at the Georgia Bureau Investigation, and they
discovered the bear's body on December twentieth.

Speaker 3 (01:43:48):
So that bear, you know, as much as its lived
in our hearts and minds, it essentially snorted up a
bunch of coke and died kind of on the spot.

Speaker 2 (01:43:57):
Sounds like it just.

Speaker 1 (01:43:58):
Immediately, od no, listen, let's keep in our hearts and minds.
And in Nick Terry's incredible animation that he did of this,
that's fucking classic, one of everyone's favorites. That they had
a grand old time.

Speaker 3 (01:44:12):
It was so much fun if all the Woodland creatures
came together and got why that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:19):
A medical examiner conducted an autopsy on the bear and
found every telltale sign of a massive overdose. Let's all
sing it together. Cerebral hemmaging, respiratory failure, hypothermia, renal failure, stroke,
and heart failure. Oh no, yeah, like it died died.
And then I wrote it's unclear if the detailed plans

(01:44:42):
to open a restaurant card called Bear Essentials were ever located,
because of course I did, because you had to, because
I had to get it in there. George George's tonight,
the part of the bear is being played by George Kilgarath,
by George, who hasn't eaten yet. He say it, I

(01:45:02):
get that, all right. So, but that medical examiner was
so impressed with the bear and its state, and that
despite everything, the bear's body was actually in good shape.
So he was like, you know, it'd be a pity
just to throw this in the cremator and calls up
a buddy, a hunting buddy who was a taxidermist, taxidermist,

(01:45:25):
and so the bear's tax taxidermy, taxidermized, that's a word,
and put on display at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation
Area in Georgia. But it doesn't have like a plaque
saying what it is. It's just like a fucking taxidermy bear.
So it doesn't it doesn't get its full glory just yet.

(01:45:45):
But so there's an approaching wildfire that forces the employees
of that place to load up some of their artifacts
into a storage unit. Someone breaks into the storage unit,
steals a bunch of artifacts and cocaine bear twisted turns man.

Speaker 3 (01:46:05):
So sorry, a forest fires coming, and they're like, grab
the important stuff, Dan, you, Jerry Rick and TJ. Grab
that fucking gigantic taxidermy bear that died five ways.

Speaker 1 (01:46:20):
And I'll go get the arrowheads, like.

Speaker 2 (01:46:25):
We'll get the precious, precious arrow I'll get the precious.

Speaker 1 (01:46:29):
Feathers in the arrowheads while you guys lug the fucking
cocaine bear.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
The the fully taxidermied and stuffed with sawdust.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
Yeah, hurry up, guys. Okay. Then some creeper creep.

Speaker 2 (01:46:44):
Some college students find out that the cocaine bears at
the at the.

Speaker 1 (01:46:51):
Storage unit at the George Georgia storage unit on I
five and where I five meets the two tents, the
two ten that's Glenndale, okay, nearly three decker Okay, so
it's stolen, goodbye, gone forever. So we think no. Almost
thirty years later after the bear's death. The Eccentric they're

(01:47:15):
described as an eccentric retailer Kentucky for Kentucky, which you
can go online and find their website. They seem like
a lot of real fun people because yeah, they do
some digging and investigating. They contact local pawn shops where
the storage unit had been and are like, hey, do
you remember thirty some odd years ago getting a bear

(01:47:38):
a taxier I made bear from the shop owners like, yeah,
that came in at the same time that some like
some like uh uh feathers and feathers and aarrawheads came
in and we found out they were stolen, so we
returned those, but the bear was never claimed, so we
sold it. Kentucky for Kentucky were like, well, where did
that bear go? And they're like, let us look up

(01:48:00):
our records. They find their records, and it turns out
that the beard, somehow, through some changes, fallen into hands
of country legend Whalon Jennings. No, no, Waylon Jennings. Here
on miss tucking line. We have Whalen fucking us.

Speaker 2 (01:48:21):
In the bullet.

Speaker 1 (01:48:22):
There you go. So it turns out that Whalon Jennings
has a huge private collection of preserved animals. He's like
a big animal head head.

Speaker 2 (01:48:31):
He's a big dead animal headhead exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:48:34):
So he actually Waylon Jennings, Kentucky for Kentucky found out
has relationships with pawn shop owners throughout the South to
let him know whenever they get like a really good
taxi remeter preserved bear.

Speaker 2 (01:48:47):
And me too, me too.

Speaker 1 (01:48:51):
So they had contacted him and it had gone with
Waylon Jennings to Nevada to live with Whalon Jennings in
Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 (01:48:58):
Yeah, this bear, this bear is living now more than ever.

Speaker 1 (01:49:02):
Spear has had a more exciting life than any of us.
Oh shit, except for Karen in the nineties. Okay, that's true.

Speaker 2 (01:49:11):
Nineties Karen can't compete with cocaine fuckingtely.

Speaker 1 (01:49:14):
So they trace it further in its illustrious journey, and
they find that it's current owner and its current resting
place was a traditional Chinese medicine shop in Reno, and
it's owned by the now deceased man named Zou Tang,
and it had been used there as decoration. So Kentucky
for Kentucky contacts this man's widow, mister Tang's widow, and

(01:49:38):
she tells them that her husband quote was always ringing
home junk from auctions and estate sales and things like that.
The bear was one of his favorite things. He just
loved it for some reason. At first, he had great
fucking taste. At first. He wanted to keep it in
our living room, but I wouldn't have it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:55):
It scared me.

Speaker 1 (01:49:56):
I made him take it to the store.

Speaker 3 (01:50:00):
You knew there was going to be an irritated wife
somewhere along the line, whether it was missus Jennings or
missus Tang.

Speaker 2 (01:50:08):
Here where it's somebody going, are you fucking kidding?

Speaker 1 (01:50:12):
You're not keeping that near the children?

Speaker 2 (01:50:15):
No full size bears in the TV.

Speaker 1 (01:50:17):
Room talked about this. I come home with an estates
from a state's side with a pair of matching vintage lamps.
Mister Tang comes home with a fucking full size with
cocaine full on cocaine bear white white powder underneath its nose.
So Kentucky for Kentucky, in their fucking infinite glory, tells
her the whole story, and she's like, uh, they said,

(01:50:37):
she almost didn't believe us, but she said that if
you've gone to that much trouble, we could just have
quote the damn thing just to get it out of
her sight. Do you know what they do? You know
what she charged them?

Speaker 2 (01:50:50):
Shipping shipping handling.

Speaker 1 (01:50:52):
Yes, for really, she didn't charge them a penny, She said,
get it out of my fucking sight. It was two
hundred dollars to ship at home to Kentucky and they
fucking did it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:01):
No, Sorry, Can I just ask a clarifying question? Yeah,
Kentucky for Kentucky is like a like a basically a
cool store.

Speaker 1 (01:51:09):
All now, let me see hold On, let me look
up Stephen.

Speaker 2 (01:51:11):
Hold On is like an artist collective type of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:51:14):
A great question, let's find out.

Speaker 2 (01:51:17):
I just want details on these like obviously cool fun people.

Speaker 1 (01:51:21):
Because they're clearly are any best friends?

Speaker 3 (01:51:22):
Like oh yeah, oh that makes sense so there's we're
talking there's a lot of like calf tattoos.

Speaker 2 (01:51:32):
We're talking about a lot of interesting glasses. I'm seeing.

Speaker 1 (01:51:37):
Their website is ky for ky oh, and they have
a fun mall. Okay, you know there's a there's a
commercial online. It looks like just like a like a
cool shop of like Kentucky gear. It says a kick
ass commonwealth since nineteen oh, a kick ass commonwealth since

(01:51:58):
seventeen ninety two. That's about the actual state of Kentucky
they're talking about. Got it? Oh? Got it? Okay? They
look like a wacky bunch. I'm looking at their about site.
There's a lot of there's a Kentucky Fried chicken bucket hat.
Let's see.

Speaker 2 (01:52:13):
Did you see the shirt?

Speaker 3 (01:52:14):
It looks like a like a Yale sweatshirt, but it says, y'all,
oh that's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:52:20):
Okay, I want one of those real back. Here's their mission.
Our mission is to engage and inform the world by
promoting Kentucky people, places, and products, and to kick ass
for the commonwealth. All right, nice, I love them. Okay,
so they'll be invited to our next show and invited
to give me a Kentucky Fried chicken hat Please.

Speaker 2 (01:52:39):
Ky presents the never Ending Pandemic warehouse Sale.

Speaker 1 (01:52:43):
They also have a commercial for their fun mall that
like is super kitchy and funny, so look them up online.

Speaker 3 (01:52:49):
Yeah, these shirts, Oh my god. You know how the
Chickatas or Cicadas however.

Speaker 2 (01:52:54):
You pronounce it.

Speaker 3 (01:52:55):
There's a thing where they're coming back this year after
twenty eight years, and they're all gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
They have a picture on the ki for ky Whip.

Speaker 3 (01:53:03):
It's kaf for ky dot com and it's a Cicada's
T shirt and it says, let me hear y'all.

Speaker 1 (01:53:09):
Make some noise. So they're a fun bunch.

Speaker 2 (01:53:14):
They're funny. They're funny and fun and love.

Speaker 1 (01:53:18):
To have fun and buy bears. So they bought it.
That makes it even better. They bought They tracked down
single handedly and bought the Cocaine Bear because they thought
it was I bet they were drinking one night and
we're like, you know, it would be so funny and
what we need here a cocaine bear and they're like,
what happened to it?

Speaker 3 (01:53:33):
And then they found it really quick. They have a
T shirt that says I'm not a cat, I'm I'm
here live, I'm not a cat from when that guy
was in court and the cat face. They have a
T shirt over there, I'm not a cat. Yeah, these
guys are on the ball on Kentucky style, on trend. Okay,

(01:53:54):
and there's a Cocaine Bear. They have their own Cocaine
Bear T shirt. Sorry, sorry, part of it? What? Well,
you don't looking at their website while you're trying to
tell your story and let me know what the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:54:04):
Let me read this. So the bear is now on
display at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington.
They sell a line of merchandise based on the bear,
including T shirts which you've seen me wearing before. Someone
at our Kentucky show gave me one hats, hoodies, mugs, stickers,
and snow globes that they call blow globes sense of humor. Yeah, okay,

(01:54:27):
as we all read in Variety, recently, Elizabeth banks As
signed on to direct the Cocaine Bear film, produced by
the dudes who made the Lego movies, and they haven't
released a lot of details, but the movie has been
described as a quote, character driven thriller inspired by truth
events that took place in Kentucky. In nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 2 (01:54:46):
So I hope, oh, period piece, period piece, GA thriller.
It could be great.

Speaker 1 (01:54:51):
It's gonna be great. And then I wrote, hopefully they'll
include the quote that was included in Thornton's obituary. So
Andrew Thornton's obituary one line read quote, I'm glad his
parachute didn't open.

Speaker 2 (01:55:05):
What someone ate at him?

Speaker 1 (01:55:07):
You make some enemies when you're Jesus. It reminds me
of I curse you with my dying breath. Yeah, I'm
glad this parachute didn't open. Someone fu Wait, that can't
have been in his habituation obituary. I swear to God
that doesn't steved. Will you look it up and put
it on.

Speaker 2 (01:55:27):
They usually don't let shit like that through. Was it
in the guest book?

Speaker 1 (01:55:32):
No, it says obituary. I swear.

Speaker 2 (01:55:36):
Wow, that's intense.

Speaker 1 (01:55:37):
The last line I'll tell you is that, according to
his friends, Andrew Carter Thornton the Second died a millionaire,
and according to us, the Cocaine Bear died happy. That's
the real story of Cocaine Bear. There's also a book
which has the entire story of Thornton's smuggling operation as
far as anyone's aware of it. It's called the Blue

(01:55:59):
Grid Conspiracy by Sally Denton from nineteen ninety So check
that out if you're into fucking crazy ass stories.

Speaker 2 (01:56:07):
I mean, it's so much cocaine.

Speaker 1 (01:56:10):
That's a crazy fucking story. It is nuts.

Speaker 3 (01:56:13):
Also, like it's yeah, the idea that someone drops from
the sky and dies in your backyard. I bet he
was dead before he hit the ground though, if he
absolutely he had a heart attack, first of all, because
you know, he was probably on some cocaine, and then
he jumps out in a parachute and that parachute doesn't open.

Speaker 1 (01:56:36):
At least unconscious, you gotta hope.

Speaker 3 (01:56:39):
Please Well also because that just means he's falling straight down.
So yeah, that's gonna just this whole it's so extreme.

Speaker 2 (01:56:48):
It's like it's the most like fucking red Bull story
of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:56:54):
It's just nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:56:55):
Eighties nineteen eighties.

Speaker 1 (01:56:57):
Red Bull story. I bet the movie is gonna be
sponsored by Red Bull and you can really shit you
should be required to like chug three Red Bulls before
you watch that or whatever. Cola, can I bring those
back for this movie? The og or just or just
some plain old cocaine in a nice popcorn bucket. Well,

(01:57:18):
I mean that was great. Should we let that story
be our fucking hurrah? Maybe?

Speaker 2 (01:57:23):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:57:23):
I think that was a fucking ray right hold on.
Epigram a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in
a clever and amusing way. Okay, what what that guy read?
That's not an epigram you're thinking about? An epigram is
like you know what I'm saying, and the epigram was
the word you got it? And then it's like the

(01:57:44):
point of battle is to inflict as much pain in
the shortest amount of time.

Speaker 2 (01:57:49):
That's not an epigram. Is like, don't let the screen
door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Speaker 1 (01:57:53):
I believe you mean more like, let the screen door
hit you where the good Lord splitch you like that?

Speaker 2 (01:57:59):
Or a number?

Speaker 1 (01:58:02):
Did you find the obituary? Yes?

Speaker 4 (01:58:03):
So. In the Rolling Stone article, it says the district
attorney who prosecuted Andrew said, I'm glad his parachute didn't open.
I hope he got a hell of a high out
of it. Out of that what a dick?

Speaker 3 (01:58:15):
I mean, unless what he was saying is I love
him so much. He's such my good friend that he
got the big final.

Speaker 1 (01:58:21):
I bet he didn't even want the parachute to open,
is what he was saying. It just sounds different when
you say, I'm glad his parachute does it didn't? It
does very bad. Yeah, maybe he was like he got
the ultimate high. I'm glad. Oh I loved him. I'm
glad his parish it didn't open. It's what he would
have wanted. That makes that sounds way better.

Speaker 2 (01:58:40):
No one wants their parachute not to open.

Speaker 3 (01:58:42):
Sorry, here's the first example of an epigram and gokay,
it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness,
eleanor Roosevelt.

Speaker 1 (01:58:52):
And then she's as to kill all your enemies with
a swim all and let God sort them out Eleanor Russel,
Eleanor Roosevelt lovingly. Wow, all right, well, this story is
full of in misinformation. Let us know if you know
any other love stories that we should cover full of misinformation.

(01:59:12):
I think that's our speciality. Yeah, thanks for listening. You
guys are a treat and a treasure, and we appreciate
all of your hard work and not so hard work.

Speaker 3 (01:59:24):
Yeah, we appreciate it when you relax, We appreciate you
at all times, resting, in motion, whatever, stay sexy and
don't get murdered.

Speaker 1 (01:59:35):
Goodbye, Elvis.

Speaker 2 (01:59:37):
Do you want a cookie?